Does pink make you puke?

HEADS TURN as 42-year-old Sandra Lerner strides into the tea room of Manhattan's Pierre Hotel. She's not just walking, she's making a statement. Most of the room reeks of money and power: elegant business suits and expensive hairdos. Lerner is virtually shouting, "Look at me;I can afford this place but I'm not one of you." She says it with pale turquoise nail polish, a grunge-style, sheer turquoise shirt and magenta hair hanging limply down her back.

Considering her accomplishments, Sandra Lerner is entitled to make a statement like that. With Leonard Bosack, she founded Cisco Systems (1996 revenues: $5.4 billion), one of Silicon Valley's biggest success stories. They created the first commercially successful router, a device that enables once-incompatible computers in far-off computer networks to communicate. In 1990 they walked away with $170 million after being booted by the professional managers the firm's venture capitalists brought in.

As she munches vegetarian sandwiches, Lerner does not want to talk computer routers. She wants to talk nail polish;specifically, the hip product line made by her new company, Urban Decay. With names like Uzi, Gash and Asphyxia, the vivid, deep makeup colors are supposed to reflect the realities of the urban environment. Shattered is bluish-green and resembles a shattered car windshield; Roach is dark brown, as is Rat; Snow is not white (think urban);it's yellow.

Hard-edged stuff? You bet. But so far, no Cisco. Urban Decay grossed less than $5 million wholesale in 1996, its first year on the market. Never mind. Lerner's making a statement again. "Fundamentally I was just pissed off that [cosmetics firms] were telling women they had to look like Barbie," says Lerner. She sneers at the mention of the ubiquitous pink and red nail polish and lipstick shades. "I think we've created something that is about choice. You don't have to be afraid of anything you can wash off."

Are women ready for this? Lerner became convinced she had a good idea a couple of years ago when she noticed Chanel's Vamp, a black-red nail polish that was a far cry from the traditional pinks and reds. Vamp was hot. Why not more like it?

Lerner and her financial adviser, David Soward, now president of Urban Decay, spent six weeks putting the product line together. "Does pink make you puke? "blared the first ads.

In just six months Urban Decay was in stores like Fred Segal, a chain of super-trendy Los Angeles boutiques. A few months later, and having gone through nearly $1 million in Lerner's seed money, Urban Decay had its own counters in Nordstrom. Within a year Lerner had lots of imitators, including industry giant Revlon, which came out with a similar line.

Lerner has been getting people's attention since she was a kid. She was raised by two aunts, splitting her time between a California cattle ranch and Beverly Hills, after her parents split up when she was 4 years old. She started her business career when she was 9, buying a steer, selling it and investing in two more. By the time she went to California State University, Chico, she had 30 head of registered cattle. She went on to Stanford, where she did graduate work in computational mathematics. She met Leonard Bosack at the Stanford computer lab.

He was a little different from most of her classmates. "Nerd culture at Stanford was pretty extreme," says Lerner. "There was no way I could have taken one of these people home to meet my family. But Len's clothes were clean, he bathed, and he knew how to use silverware. That was enough. I was enchanted." At Cisco, Bosack was the technological genius. Lerner contributed her fierce intensity and entrepreneurial drive. The couple married in 1980 and have since separated but remain on close personal terms. The two talk in computer shorthand: Lerner says "Control-D!" when she wants Bosack to shut up.

Together they have a charitable foundation and trust funded with 70% of the money from the sale of their Cisco stock. The foundation provides a tax-advantaged channel for pursuing their idiosyncratic interests. The foundation finances a wide range of animal welfare and science projects. It also bought an English manor house once owned by Jane Austen's brother that Lerner plans to turn into a research center on 18th- and 19th-century women writers. She is an avid collector of early editions by these authors.

Lerner's personality is as hard-edged as her dress and manner. She is being sued by her horse trainer and former close friend, Patricia Holmes, with whom she developed the first Urban Decay color, Bruise. Holmes claims Lerner breached an oral contract to share ownership of the company. "She didn't have a role in the company, and my gardener didn't have a role either," says Lerner. "She hung on for a while, kind of in a groupie status, because she was my friend and she had my horses."

After Lerner wrote a letter to Revlon Cosmetics U.S.A. president, Kathy Dwyer, Revlon sued Urban Decay asking for a ruling that it had not infringed on Urban Decay's trademark. Lerner's letter protested that the giant company had "ripped off" Urban Decay's products with its new Street Wear line of alternative colors. The letter began "Does pink make you puke? I doubt it."

Last year Urban Decay was profitable, despite its meager revenues. Cosmetics margins are enormous: A bottle of Urban Decay nail polish costs less than a dollar to make and sells for $6 to retailers, who charge $11. But Lerner says she's already bored. "I guess the things that were bugging me are not bugging me anymore," she says. "Blue-green nail polish is really mainstream now."